Brand Monitoring Online

Brand monitoring online is the ongoing process of identifying and tracking your brand mentions online. Brand monitoring has become a challenge with the growth of online publishing and social media.

Monitor your Brand Online

Who talks about your brand online?

With the aggressive growth of the number of social media channels, blogs and websites anyone can talk about anything these days. Your customers, your employees, your general community, your competitors, prospective customers can ask questions about your company… and in addition anyone can share these mentions. If your mentions in this process go viral they can reach millions of visitors and readers online.

Who reads your brand mentions?

This is the key question in online marketing and brand management. Your prospective customers who are in the awareness and evaluation stage in the buying process will certainly do some research on your brand and your company online.

Fill-in-the blank Excel KPI templates, dashboards, scorecards:

They are the ones who read your mentions and what has been said about your brand can encourage them to start doing business with you or the opposite will happen – if they read about poor experiences and unprofessional business practices they’ll do business with your competitors.

How customers make decisions by searching online?

The buying process and decision making online (the macro level):

1. Awareness stage

Prospects learn about your brand or consider your company as a viable alternative. They see your ad, they talk with your sales rep, they find your website online, they find your brand mention somewhere online… They are really interested in what you offer so they want to learn more about your company and the way you do business.

2. Evaluation stage

Since prospects are considering your company and they have interest to learn more, they evaluate your brand and business by searching online to read more. What they find is your website and many mentions of your brand online. This can be social media mentions, tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn discussions, product review websites, blogs related to your industry, press releases, forums, news, professional organizations… They evaluate the value of your brand and compare your company with your competitors based on what information they find about your company online.

3. Decision stage

After the evaluation process, prospects make a decision based on their evaluation. The decision will be to make a purchase and try to do business with you or to forget about your brand!

The brand monitoring as a marketing and business intelligence process deals with the second step in the buying process: the evaluation.

Because of that it is important for you to be the first to identify your brand mentions and know what others read about your business before it is too late. Negative brand mentions can be fixed by engaging on time and taking care of any issues and positive mentions can be leveraged by sharing and creating additional content. It is crucial to be able to listen to your brand mentions on time on an ongoing basis.

Can I just search online to find my brand mentions?

You can use search engines and specialized tools focused on certain social media channels to search for information related to your brand online. However this approach will take hours of searching and browsing online every day and it will still miss many of your brand mentions. In addition search engines sometimes take days to visit a certain website to be included in the search engines results and they do not show the latest social media updates.